One-Act Plays as Part of the Writing Legacy of Raymond Carver

Abstract

Raymond Carver is a master of the short story and has also written three one-act plays exploring themes of infidelity, communication in marriage, and people's acceptance of their own roles and bodies. He has also collaborated with poet Tess Gallagher on a movie script about Dostoevsky. Carver's plays and screenplays have never been published or staged on, but his experiments with the genre helped him to learn how to use dramaturgical techniques to create the texts of his stories, which makes his creative legacy interesting to analyze in terms of assessing their stage potential.